Daily Archives: 2020-05-07

Article note: Oh yes google, another reorg will surely fix your wasteland of fragmented, ill-conceived, and no longer trustworthy due to repeated shutdowns messaging situation.
Until I hear them addressing it from the perspective of "We want to reward engineers who spend their energy maintaining core services, rather than only for working on shiny new things" I don't see a plausible way for them to fix their shit.

In October of last year, Google hired Javier Soltero to be the VP and GM of G Suite, its set of office apps and — importantly for today’s news — Google Meet and Google Chat. Now, the company is putting him in charge of yet another set of products: Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android.

The move puts all of Google’s major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero’s team. Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google’s apps, so don’t get your hopes up for that (yet). “We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes,” Soltero says.

Still, Google’s communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development,...

Article note: Huh, I've stayed away because they still seemed a little too flighty, but Keybase was working on actual problems of distrubuted security/identity, and building neat things like kbfs that looked like plausible solutions to real problems.
Hopefully Zoom doesn't completely ruin them in their rush to use keybase to security-wash their own product.